Lawyer Well Being
| Publication year | 2019 |
| Pages | 67 |
| Citation | Vol. 88 No. 10 Pg. 67 |
November, 2019
Permission to Watch Puppy Webcams and Cute Cat Videos
You know those darling puppy webcams—or those cute cat videos? Turns out they might enhance your own well-being. (Well, as long as you don't watch them all day). Watching them is one of the suggested activities on the Wheel of Well-Being circulated recently by the ABA Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs and Center for Professional Responsibility. WAIT — watching cute animal videos is recommended by the Center for Professional Responsibility? How can that be? Here's the connection as I see it: activities that enhance individual well-being also tend to foster a healthy lawyer; a healthy lawyer is usually a competent lawyer. Competent, healthy lawyers don't often fall into ethical violations.
That approach caught the attention of some Kansas lawyers, and then the Supreme Court, which is supporting the Kansas Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being. Visit the new website here: www.Kslawyerwellbeing.com.
Just as a quick review, there was a National Report on Lawyer Well-Being issued in 2017 that documented a toxic legal culture with unsustainable levels of depression, anxiety and substance abuse. The Report recommended that individual states form their own task force and promote lawyer well-being. Many lawyers in Kansas have been meeting and working on implementing the Report's recommendations. National and state task forces are encouraging activities that promote thriving in all six dimensions of well-being.[1] So when you heard about all this maybe you even thought it was a good thing. "But I (you may have thought) am really way too busy to get into that stuff". Or perhaps you thought,"That's a great idea. I just wish I wasn't so busy; I'd work on that stuff". Or, "I need a quick, cheap and easy way to grow my own wellbeing."
Well, somebody heard you. The ABA sponsored the creation of a Lawyer Well-Being Tool Kit with more resources and ideas than you' ll ever use: https://www.americanbar.org/ content/dam/aba/administrative/lawyer_assistance/ls_colap_ well-being_toolkit_for_lawyers_legal_employers.pdf
But even that may be a daunting place to begin so somebody must have remembered that acronym KISS for the slogan that's a slice of wisdom: Keep It Simple, Sweetie. And so the ABA came up with 24 activities, ranging in length from one minute to 60—activities that even a really...
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